Braves hurler John Rocker isn’t the first ballplayer who needed a little help with his mental game.

Jimmy Piersall, the former Red Sox and Mets outfielder, also kept the shrinks busy during his heyday.

In his rookie season at Boston, Piersall was a wild man on the field.

This is how he described the summer of 1952 in a magazine story:

“I was a ripe subject for sportswriters and columnists. I gagged up one thing after another, and almost everybody but the men on the field thought I was a riot,” he wrote.

“I made life miserable for the umpires with absurd and violent protests over routine decisions. I stormed and screamed and even once cried like a baby. I mocked my teammates and got into fistfights with friends and foe alike.”

He didn’t know it, but Piersall, then 22, was having a nervous breakdown. The Sox sent him to a state mental hospital.

Two years later, he chronicled his battle and comeback in “Fear Strikes Out,” which was made into a movie starring Anthony Perkins.

But Piersall’s wacky antics weren’t completely behind him.

Playing with Cleveland in 1960, Piersall threw an orange at the scoreboard and a bat at Yankees pitcher Jim Coates.

In 1963, his first and last year with the Mets, he ran the bases backward after hitting his 100th major league homer.

Even after retiring from baseball in 1967, Piersall still managed to get into hot water — choking a reporter in 1980 and getting suspended from a radio job the next year for comments about ballplayers’ wives.

The Chicago Cubs hired him as a minor-league instructor — but he lost that job last year after criticizing the team management on a radio show.